Former NJ police chief accused of hate crime, excessive force

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CAMDEN, N.J. — A white former New Jersey police chief charged with slamming a handcuffed black man’s head into a metal doorjamb harbored an intense hatred toward black people and was recorded using slurs by an officer concerned about his behavior, a federal prosecutor said Wednesday.

Frank Nucera, who retired as Bordentown Township police chief while under FBI investigation in January, was arrested Wednesday morning and charged with civil rights and hate crime charges. He was scheduled to appear in court later Wednesday and his attorney wasn’t immediately available for comment.

According to court documents, Nucera approached the 18-year-old from behind and smashed his head into a doorjamb while the suspect was being escorted by two officers from a hotel in September 2016. A fellow officer then recorded him making a series of racist comments where he called the man a racial slur, according to a criminal complaint.

Bordentown is a predominantly white town of about 11,000 a few miles from New Jersey’s majority African-American capital city of Trenton.

Acting U.S. Attorney William E. Fitzpatrick said the man wasn’t endangering the officers and that assault was driven by “racial hatred.”

The 60-year-old, who also served as a township administrator before retiring, also had a history of making racist comments and used police dogs to intimidate African-Americans, including stationing them at high school basketball games to intimidate black fans, prosecutors said.

One of his police officers secretly recorded Nucera’s comments over the course of a year because prosecutors said he was “increasingly alarmed by (Nucera’s) racist remarks and hostility toward African Americans.” Prosecutors said that some of them “contain extremely offensive racist comments” by Nucera.

In one of the recordings outlined by prosecutors, Nucera said of African Americans that he was “tired of them” and “it’s getting to the point where I could shoot one.”